Movies We Want and Movies We Need

Movies We Want and Movies We Need

I told a huge lie when I wrote about The Marvel Cinematic Universe before the release of Avengers: Infinity War:

“Infinity War will arrive soon, and you can bet I’ll be reviewing it as soon as I get a chance to see it, so stay tuned!”

What happened, Clayton? 

By the time I saw it, it had already made close to a billion dollars—yes, a billion dollars—and been reviewed and critiqued and analyzed and spoiled thoroughly. That was only one week after its release. I saw no point in putting my thoughts out there, since they weren’t much more unique than what everyone else thought. Yeah, I liked it, quite a bit actually, more than I expected. The end. Next.  

2018 hasn’t been a great year for movies for me, personally, and I’ve been struggling to figure out why, when it seems like general movie-goers are enjoying the content being pumped out by Hollywood for the most part. I think I’ve figured out the reason, with the recent release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the latest adventure in a galaxy far, far away, which has people talking and arguing once again.

The last big movie that really hit it home for me (and, without coincidence, is the last movie I reviewed positively on my blog) was Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. Many fans—in fact, most, I’d say—were mixed to negative on it, mainly because they felt it got Star Wars wrong. If anything, I felt it got Star Wars right in places where the previous Episode VII: The Force Awakens stumbled. Writer/Director Rian Johnson made bold, unexpected decisions with the characters and delivered a far more unique story than Force Awakens’ basic rehash of A New Hope. 

But fans didn’t want that. So what did they want? Here’s a quote from Mark Hamill, about working on Last Jedi with Rian Johnson.

“Last Jedi was incredibly daring…I would say ‘we really have to think about what the audience expects and what they want. He says ‘no, no, we have to do the opposite, we have to give them something they don’t expect that we want.’” 

I champion this kind of writing mentality. Sure, not everything in Last Jedi paid off as a result of this approach, but it certainly made for an exceedingly more interesting film to watch and discuss. More interesting in comparison to what, you might ask? Well Solo wasn’t particularly engaging, story wise.

In case you don’t know, Solo is the second of Disney’s standalone Star Wars films set outside the main episodic storyline, with the previous one having been 2016’s Rogue One (check out my review on it for more thoughts). When Solo was announced, right away people went, “an origin story about Han Solo? Who wants to see that?” According to the box office, not many. It made less than 100 million opening weekend, which was considered a flop. 

This is the world we live in. A movie that makes 84 million dollars opening weekend is considered a failure. To be fair, in comparison to every other Star Wars movie, it is the lowest opening, and not by just a little. Why did it do badly? There’s a host of reasons, some of which I’ll get into shortly.

I’ve seen headlines like “Solo Box Office Disappoints: Does Star Wars Need to Shift Focus?” “Star Wars: How Many Movies is Too Many?” “Boba Fett Movie Announced: Do Star Wars Fans Want This Movie?” 

That last one is what struck me. Do fans want this movie? Since when do fans know what they want? 

And that’s the key to all of this, to my lack of enthusiasm for the big movies in 2018. All of the biggest movies these days are being produced with the fans in mind. Every one of these big tent pole blockbuster movies has to be a crowd-pleaser, in such specific ways. You have to have x, y, and z in there so people will stand up out of their seats and clap and cheer and point at the screen and say “I know what that is!” And I’m not even exaggerating. 

People don’t know what they want. They think they do, but they don’t. With these blockbusters, whether we’re talking superhero movies or Jurassic Park movies or Star Wars or whatever, they’re just focusing on what people want and making more of it. I admit to not knowing much about the true intricacies of producing large Hollywood films, but all I can go on is what is presented at the theaters week in and week out. 

I need to pump the brakes for a second. To gain some perspective, this isn’t exactly a new tactic. Movies that gain success are always milked for all their worth. Why are there 3 Robocop movies or 11 Friday the 13^th movies (not counting the remakes)? Because the first ones made money. Of course Hollywood has always been a business, and always will be a business, but it seems like every year there are fewer new attempts to make the next big thing and more and more rehashes of the same old stuff. We are firmly stuck in an age of nostalgia. 

Let me go back to Last Jedi. I didn’t just like it because it did unexpected things. In fact, some critics have cited its attempts to thwart audience expectations as a huge flaw in the film; risks were taken purely to be shocking, not to pay off in any dramatic sense, and I can understand where these critics are coming from. But, I interpreted what I saw as a clear vision from a filmmaker who knew what he wanted to do, and I enjoyed seeing that. What I didn’t like about Rogue One was it felt like the studio cobbled together some “cool” Star Wars elements and put them into what ended up feeling like the biggest, most-expensive fan film I had ever seen. There was no original angle or vision or story that I could see and latch onto, just lots of hollow visual effects without any interesting characters or plot elements to back it up. 

Back to Solo. Why are people not head over heels about it? It answers questions fans have been asking for decades, after all. What did Han Solo mean when he said the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs? How did Han meet Chewie, and Lando? Seeing all of these things answered in a film is purely fan service, not because it helps paint a clearer picture of the character or tell parts of a missing story. I think a big reason for Solo’s disappointment is that it’s only been five months since the last Star Wars movie. 

Star Wars isn’t the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it feels like Disney is trying to make it the next one of those. Let’s remember that the Marvel Cinematic Universe started only ten years ago, and from the beginning, fans have been conditioned to expect the next movie in the ongoing tale in a relatively short amount of time. With Star Wars, it’s utterly different. The original trilogy had three years between each film, and for a long time, those three movies were it. Then the prequels came, but they weren’t furthering the story. It was all backtracking. Still, three years between each. That’s six movies, over the course of nearly thirty years. All of a sudden, we’ve had four Star Wars movies over the course of four years, two of which are prequels, and to paraphrase Willy Wonka, it certainly shows no signs of slowing. Love them or hate them, these Disney Star Wars films all have the distinct sense of having been made with the fans in mind, catering to what they think fans want (especially with the standalone films). This still applies to Last Jedi, even if, as far as I’m concerned, it is the most original and least-concerned with “fans” of all four.  Do you really think there was someone who sat down at a meeting at Lucasfilm and pitched an original, bold vision for a Han Solo origin movie? I highly doubt it. 

Love them or hate them, you have to at least give George Lucas a pinch of credit when it came to doing the Star Wars prequels. He did some things in those movies out of fan service, yes, but not everything. You think he went “I know fans would love to find out that the force is really microscopic organisms!” He thought that was a good idea, and he went with it. I’m not saying it was a good idea, but kudos to him for having an original idea and sticking with it, not thinking about what the fans might like when it came to every little detail. 

When the original Star Wars came out, it was just a movie. It wasn’t purported to be the next great thing. To contextualize it for back then, no one was saying, “Star Wars is going to be the next Jaws!” (except for Spielberg), which was the highest grossing movie at the time of its release. It was a daring, ambitious film, and it paid off. Here’s a bold statement, or maybe it’s not so bold: not a single one of today’s mega blockbusters is ambitious or daring. Studios just play it safe, making films for fans so they’ll definitely make a profit. 

Not every example of a film made specifically for fans is bad, though. In 2016, we got Deadpool, which was a significantly different take on the superhero genre than what we had been used to seeing in recent years. It was R-rated, edgy, funny, and went hard. Not only did hard-core Deadpool fans rejoice at the character finally getting his own movie, it appealed to a wide audience, and was hugely successful. Now this year, we got Deadpool 2, which although a pretty good sequel, I thought, didn’t feel as hard or fresh as the original. 

While I’m on the topic of 2018 movies, what about Avengers: Infinity War, anyway? I think what I liked the most about it was how unexpected it was, kind of like The Last Jedi. Infinity War paired up characters I didn’t think would get to share the screen together, characters I expected to have limited cameos had full, well-constructed scenes, the storyline was layered and interesting, and it didn’t simply rehash what we had seen before. Having said that, it’s still just another big Marvel movie, so I can’t get that excited about it, because I’ve been getting excited about the same kind of movie for so many years now, it’s starting to wear thin. 

Sometimes I get this feeling when something like Avengers: infinity War or Deadpool 2 or Solo comes out that I’m supposed to like this. Oh, you’re a Star Wars fan? You will like Solo. You’re a Marvel fan? You will like Infinity War. These movies were made for you, after all. For the record, I didn’t like Black Panther from earlier this year, despite everyone giving it overwhelming praise, as if it were the greatest superhero movie of all-time or something. Sorry, didn’t really land with me. That’s another one that carried this sense that you have to see this movie and love it, it’s going to be huge! It’s all anyone is talking about! But it’s just another Marvel movie, the way Solo is just another Star Wars movie. Even with franchises I absolutely love. Alien: Covenant last year, The Predator and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom coming up this year. There will more—oh, so many more—and frankly, I’m just getting tired of it. Give me something new that’s as terrifying and clever as the original Alien. Give me the next great sci-fi-action thriller like the original Predator was when it came out. Come up with something as brilliant and ground-breaking as the original Jurassic Park. 

So what am I trying to get at with all of this yammering? Do I just hate modern movies now? No, I’m certainly not saying that, and I’m not even saying that I hate all the franchises I once loved. I did like Avengers: Infinity War, I hope The Predator reenergizes the franchise and lives up to the original. I just don’t put as much stock in new entries in existing franchises as I once did. 

I guess I just want Hollywood to cram something new down my throat instead of the same old thing. I want a new thing to come out of nowhere from a filmmaker who has an idea for something original, that a studio sees as something that could be the new big thing, and let it take off. Just stop looking to the fans for what they want and giving it to them. People love Han Solo, we should make a movie all about him! That isn’t going to make people love the character any more than they already do. It’s simply misguided thinking. Tell us what we should like. Give us something new and tell us to like it. We can still decide if we do or don’t, but quit serving up massive blockbusters just because it’s what “the fans” want. Make new fans.